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A Framework for Analyzing Political Shocks and Their Effects

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Shocks and Political Change

Part of the book series: Evidence-Based Approaches to Peace and Conflict Studies ((EBAPCS,volume 11))

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Abstract

This chapter proposes a theoretical framework with which to approach the concept of political shocks; then offers an empirical approach for identifying political shocks impact state policy makers; and finally applies the method to policy change across the global community of states revolving around human rights protections as an illustration of how political shocks create the opportunity for policy changes. It concludes with suggestions for future research and empirical analysis. The framework builds on previous work on public policy approaches (and its adoption by IR scholars) to policy restructuring that use a punctuated equilibrium model.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    These and earlier, relevant timelines are identified by Reuters at https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/events-leading-up-russias-invasion-ukraine-2022-02-28/ (retrieved April 9, 2022).

  2. 2.

    See “As Russian Announces Pullback, Biden Warns Ukraine Invasion Is Still Possible,” New York Times, February 15, 2022, retrieved at https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/15/world/russia-ukraine-news.

  3. 3.

    This property is salient for models of decision-making in the literature. Recall for instance Allison’s (1969) classic models of alternative decision-making approaches: organizational, incremental, and even bureaucratic politics models typically require extensive previous involvement with an issue for a policy decision to emerge. Only the rational actor model appears to be better suited for dealing with unique policy problems.

  4. 4.

    The literature on political shocks diverges over the issue of whether shocks are perceptual phenomena. Implicit in the large-N quantitative work is the assumption that political shocks are of sufficiently high magnitude that they are most likely to be perceived as shocks by policymakers. This is not the case for scholars conducting case studies or approaching the phenomenon from a constructivist perspective.

  5. 5.

    As both Israeli and Palestinian negotiators noted to one of us during interviews held in 2019, these actions were part and parcel of what each side considered to be the status quo. Palestinian negotiators indicated that they expected these conflict onsets and their sense of identity was wrapped around them. Israeli negotiators noted that these conflict onsets were anticipated and their security responses to Hamas-initiated conflicts were robust and routinized, and noted that their primary security concerns were no longer over this conflict (as Iran had become the primary focus).

  6. 6.

    Recent examples include Mali and Burkina Faso. For evidence that coups may beget more coups, see Faulkner et al. (2022), Ogunmodede (2022).

  7. 7.

    Consider France’s experience with terrorist attacks: it was subjected to roughly 65 terrorist attacks between 1958 and 2020, with a third of those attacks occurring between 2012 and 2019, averaging over three incidents per year. According to one research consortium, nearly 80% of the initiators of those attacks were on a terror watch list and 97% were on the “radar” of authorities (see NBC News, 2019, “Report: Nearly all terror attacks in France carried out by radicals already known to police,” retrieved at https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/report-nearly-all-terror-attacks-france-carried-out-radicals-already-n955276, May 25, 2011). It would be difficult to make the case that these attacks were events that could be characterized as political shocks when defined as unique, unexpected/unanticipated, and creating a dramatic alteration to the state’s stability.

  8. 8.

    For discussions of path dependency in both domestic and foreign policies, see Schieder (2019), Pierson (1996), Sarigil (2015).

  9. 9.

    The punctuated equilibrium model was initially pioneered in the field of U.S. domestic public policy (e.g., Baumgartner & Jones, 1993; Brummer et al., 2019) with later applications to comparative and foreign policy analysis. Public policy scholars had adopted much of this approach from evolutionary biologists (e.g., Eldredge, 1985, 1995).

  10. 10.

    For sake of simplification, the framework is focused on a monadic, state level of analysis. We recognize however that one political shock may have effects on more than one state, including as well regional and global effects. We also recognize that a political shock can results in “aftershocks” that may include a substantial number of states in addition to the state experiencing the event. We discuss these variants below.

  11. 11.

    As Rasler (2000) notes some contexts will need stronger shocks than other to dislodge ongoing commitments to policies.

  12. 12.

    See especially Baumgarten and Jones (1993), Jones et al. (1998).

  13. 13.

    For a recent review of the literature on policy entrepreneurs in comparative perspective, see Aviram et al. (2020).

  14. 14.

    For examples of work highlighting the need to constrain state strength by governmental efficiency and control over corruption, see Beckley (2018), Gordell and Volgy (2022).

  15. 15.

    In the United States, caught in deep partisan divisions, generating a bipartisan approach to the Ukrainian invasion has been extremely difficult within both parties. Furthermore, Republicans have jockeyed to try to gain political advantage from the Biden administration’s carefully calibrated responses to Russian aggression.

  16. 16.

    We are not suggesting that the other three criteria are not salient; however, without satisfying the criterion of status quo impact, the event in question should not have the type of consequences we suggest in our framework, even if the event satisfies the other criteria.

  17. 17.

    For a discussion of these works and alternative measures for operationalizing state instability, see Gordell (2021), Chap. 3.

  18. 18.

    Note that these changes can be either positive or negative (e.g., major increases or decreases in economic resources) that may dramatically impact the stability of the state. For example, we would consider the discovery in Equatorial Guinea (in 1996) of a major oil field resulting in a dramatic growth of its economy as a “positive” punctuation in state equilibrium.

  19. 19.

    We are far from being the first to use GDP growth to measure changes in economic performance (e.g., Gleditsch & Ward, 2006; Meierding, 2013). Distinguishing major shocks through the use of standard deviations to measure the magnitude of a shock is also relatively common in the literature (e.g., Dreher et al., 2012; Sprecher & DeRouen, 2002).

  20. 20.

    We use the World Bank’s GDP data, available at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKP.CD. GDP data are not available from the World Bank for the socialist economies of the USSR and its European allies during the Cold War era.

  21. 21.

    Technically we could have conducted event tracing for each of the 766 cases of major economic change; however, many of the 177 states included in this effort have had insufficient attention to them either in the academic literature or in current events sources, likely creating too many false negatives. Therefore, we settled on sampling within these cases.

  22. 22.

    To qualify as a disturbance associated with a potential shock event, the event must occur either during or one year prior to the economic disturbance.

  23. 23.

    Additionally, we consulted event histories when available. For all the procedures involved, including data sources and reliability checks, see Gordell and Volgy (2022).

  24. 24.

    RPE data are available at http://transresearchconsortium.com/data.

  25. 25.

    The correlation between the two dimensions is 0.25.

  26. 26.

    Those results are described in Gordell (2021).

  27. 27.

    According to START’s global terrorism database, available at https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/access.

  28. 28.

    The FBI claims that this case was the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. We suspect that it did not have a political shock effect since it may have been perceived as a one-off aberration and not a case of security failure.

  29. 29.

    For an example of this dynamic see Blavoukos’s (2019: 31) study of the Palestinian uprising as a political shock impacting domestic political survival and creating a policy window for the Oslo accords.

  30. 30.

    This argument is derived from selectorate theory; see Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003), Siverson and Bueno de Mesquita (2017).

  31. 31.

    For the complex relationships between positive oil shocks and conflict, see Andersen et al. (2022).

  32. 32.

    The data were accessed at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/cirihumanrightsdata.

  33. 33.

    Here we used the economic dimension (major changes to a state’s GDP occurring concurrently with a political shock event) to assess the presence or absence of a political shock.

  34. 34.

    While Ukranian and Russian forces had been fighting since 2014 in and around the Donbass region of Ukraine, that conflict was a relatively tame affair compared to a full-scale Russian invasion that had initially targeted most of the country, including its capital.

  35. 35.

    Importing 40% of gas and 47% of solid fuels from Russia, along with 25% of oil (Kalish, 2022).

  36. 36.

    For more on this concern see the chapter in this volume on differential responses to the Arab Spring.

  37. 37.

    Unfortunately annual observations on bureaucratic effectiveness/efficiency through the World Bank are restricted to the 2000–2018 timeframe.

  38. 38.

    We did not find this to be the case when examining the effects of political shocks on human rights practices of states. However, they may be more evident in other policy areas.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Government and Public Policy, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 85721, USA

    Thomas J. Volgy

  2. Social Sciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Kelly Marie Gordell

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  1. Thomas J. Volgy
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Correspondence to Thomas J. Volgy .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

    William R. Thompson

  2. School of Government and Public Policy, University of Arizona, Tuscon, AZ, USA

    Thomas J. Volgy

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Volgy, T.J., Gordell, K.M. (2023). A Framework for Analyzing Political Shocks and Their Effects. In: Thompson, W.R., Volgy, T.J. (eds) Shocks and Political Change. Evidence-Based Approaches to Peace and Conflict Studies, vol 11. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1498-2_4

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